I have just received your note of yesterday.

I am sorry that I cannot accept your invitation. I have too many engagements deferred on account of my illness to be made good when I am able, to allow myself that pleasure.

“The Cotton Kingdom” has a value, first, as a record of facts and conditions contradictory to much that will be found in our literature; second, as an illustration of certain tendencies of public opinion, and of influences acting on public opinion preliminary to the War. Any considerable change or omission of passage in it—not made because of accidental verbal inaccuracies—would destroy its value in the latter respect: would wholly destroy its value to a historical student.

There is no commercial demand that would justify its re-publication. I have been writing about the suggestion to you because you have several times in the last ten years touched upon it, and because I have seen a tendency in recent literature to re-establish a romantic view of the condition of things in the Slave States before the War, which this book goes far, I think, to demonstrate was a false and most mischievous view.

If I am well enough to bear the journey, I expect to go next week with Mr. Vanderbilt to his North Carolina Estate. We have a good deal of work now in the Slave States and it is most interesting to review the field of my former travels, as I often have an opportunity to do. The revolution has been a tremendous one and I am well satisfied with the present results.